Welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I’m your host Marco Santarelli. Well, we have a really interesting show today because there’s a lot of talk about inflation in the news. If you have not been aware of that, you’re just not paying attention. The reality is, is the inflation rate in the US is the highest that it’s been since the 1990s, which is crazy. And the rising prices are affecting everything that we purchased from food to autos, to home utilities, to rent. And this is all according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, I mean, they published some pretty good data, so it’s hard not to believe what they, what they publish, but this was just released last week. So US inflation has hit a 31 year high this month in October and consumer prices just jumped 6.2%. That’s a whopping amount. That’s higher than what we typically talk about as annual rates of inflation.
And so now Americans are spending nearly 15% more on the goods and services that they buy primarily because of two reasons. Supply chain bottlenecks, just out here, not far from where I live in the long beach port, there are ships lined up forever, and they’re talking about a four-month delay before some of those ships are actually unloaded. So we have the supply chain bottlenecks creating supply shocks, driving prices up along with the endless us monetary stimulus that’s being created here, where they’re just quote-unquote printing money nonstop. These are driving prices up higher. So this creates a problem for you as a real estate investor, because how do you protect your cash from inflation while you’re saving up for your next down payment? Because you want to invest in hard assets, income-producing real estate. That’s what we all want to do, but if your cash is getting eroded away every year, faster than, you know, you can generate a return on it, you’re actually losing money. And that’s a pretty straightforward concept to understand.
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So, with me today is Taylor and Brett Sohns. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly,to discuss this problem and a possible solution. So welcome to the show guys.
Thanks for having us Marco.
So you guys are brothers working together. You’ve launched a company called Life Goal Investments. Very interesting. And I’ll be honest with my audience here. You know, when I first got an email from you guys, I was very quick to dismiss it. I was close to deleting it, and then I had to read it again a second time. And then I went to your website and I thought this problem through about inflation and saving and how do you keep up? And I thought, man, you guys kinda hit on a really important problem and you have an interesting solution to it. So let’s start the show off by you guys telling us about yourselves and then what led up to life goal investments. And then we’ll kind of dig into the problem.
So Brett and I are brothers, as you mentioned, I’m the younger brother. We grew up in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, little, one red light town. And then we went to school down around the New York City Metro area. And we did our undergrad and grad work there, both. And we wound up stumbling our way into wall street. And so for the past combined 25 years, Brett and I worked on wall streets, we traveled around the United States and worked with the wealthiest families that we are. And so at some point along the line, we realized that are these really the families that need the help realistically, the financial help that we’re providing at this point, or is it more the person that we grew up with next door, et cetera. And so we were always looking for a solution to get back to our roots, to help the everyday person and the real estate investor type people create real wealth and, and, and go about doing that in a natural way.
So what do we do? We found ourselves in a situation where Brett was going to purchase a home and home prices over the last 12 months, as we all know, have gone crazy, crazy. And they were up 16% over the last 12 months. And so he was sitting in something that was same as account like, so it was bonds yielding about 2%, but most people put their money that they have earmarked for the next real estate purchase in literally a savings account. Now savings accounts at this point, yield 0.05%. So let’s reiterate those numbers real quick. You’re trying to purchase an asset that went up over the last 12 months at 16%. And your money is sitting there getting you 0.05%, essentially nothing. And so there’s such an imbalance there. And we looked around and said, what are we going to do? And Brett was literally facing this situation where he was going to buy a home.
And so he said, Taylor, let’s try to figure out a solution that exists right now to help me hedge this potential purchase that I’m going to place in a home in the future. And we looked around and there was just nothing out there. There was nothing out there that was something between a savings account, yielding zero, and just putting your money in the stock market. And that’s what some people do is just go out and roll the dice in the stock market for their next home down payment. But the natural thing to realize with that, and the important thing to realize is that the stock market can go down dramatically. So the average year experience is a 13% drawdown the stock market last year, much more pronounced during COVID in a very brief period of time. The S&P 500 went down 34%. So there needs to be a solution somewhere between a savings account and doing nothing and rolling the dice in the stock market, which could get you good returns, but it also could see massive downside.
And that’s when we created the LifeGoal Home Down Payment Investment ETF. And so what the LifeGoal Home Down Payment Investment ETF is intended to do is have you conservatively invest your money and attempt to keep pace with home price inflation. Now, home price inflation over the last 12 months. I mentioned that 16%, but when you look at it from a wider lens, you realize that 5.4% is the average home price inflation in the United States over the past 50 years. So that’s the number we’re creating as this target return inside this product. And we’re trying to get you there in the least volatile, most conservative manner. So I’ll just touch real high level on how we put the portfolio together. When you think about the overall portfolio construction, it’s very diversified. It’s about 70% in bonds. Bonds are those instruments that are low volatility, create an income and help limit the downside of the market.
So that’s 70% of the portfolio. And then about 5% commodities. Those are things that are going to help you hedge inflation. And then 25%, the remainder of the portfolio are in stocks, but really importantly, and innovative to this portfolio. Half of that 25% exposure are in housing related stocks. So think about things that are examples like home Depot Lowe’s. If you’re using this portfolio to save for the next down payment and offset home price inflation, that’s experienced, why not put it in things that might ride along that flight of rising prices like home Depot, if there’s continued demand and houses and inflation causing that are causing the demand, causing the inflation, there’s going to be an increase in prices at things that are bought in places like home Depot and Lowe’s and those stocks should commend, certainly do well. So that’s creating that natural hedge.
So I remember you were sharing some stats for me before about the locations or the places people park their cash while they’re saving up for a down payment. Can you give me a breakdown of where people are actually saving or parking their money, you know, while they’re saving for that down payment before they deploy it?
Yeah. So the bulk of the money sits in the savings account. So most folks that are real estate investors put their money aside in a savings account because they can trust it. But what you can also trust at the same time is the fact that if you’re sitting there getting 0.05% and home prices are going up, even at the average, long-term at 5.4%, much less 16% last year, your purchasing power is being negated by again, 5.4 or 16% in the last year, which is an astronomical amount. You need to start thinking about a smarter way to allocate those assets. So you can afford that purchase more quickly.
So let me ask you this. Why would I want to consider a fund like yours, which I think is a brilliant idea, and I’d like you to talk more about it as well as the proprietary part of it, that the patent-pending piece of it, but why would I choose that when I can pick an index fund, like an S&P index fund or something like that, and just ride the market as a whole and know that I don’t need to try and pick individual companies or stocks when I can just float along with all the other ships on the rising tide.
Yeah. Right. Well, that’s great when it is a rising tide, but on the other side of it, you see meaningful downside in the stock market. So the average drawdown in the stock market since the 1980s per year is 13%. And obviously it can be much more pronounced than that. So last year during COVID, it was 34% drawdown in two eight, even more meaningful than that at 49% drawdown in the market. So if you’re planning on making that purchase and all of a sudden you get hit with this fast ball that comes in, that you don’t expect and a huge drop in the market, you can no longer afford that purchase. So Brett, why don’t you talk a little bit more about the portfolio construction and how we’d go about doing that?
Yeah. So Marco, just touching back on your question there. So Taylor and I have invested in real estate over the years to a one point a couple of years ago, before we started to wind down our real estate exposure. We actually had 11 properties in a, in two different states. So, and today I’m actually in search of buying my next property or building a house for my family is what my plan is. Moving out of downtown this, in this nice little city, we live in an upstate New York and, and and building a house a little bit outside of town so I can grow my family. The point of that is, is I thought I was going to build that house in 2020. Now it’s 2021. I’m not going to build it in 2021. I don’t even know if I’m going to start it in 2022. So whether it’s building your own house or buying your own house or buying a real estate investment property, you don’t always know exactly when it’s going to happen. Right? And if an opportunity presents itself, you also want to be able to carpet diem and get liquid on whatever your investment is to acquire that property, whether it’s a downtown commercial property or a house or whatever, whatever it may be.
So just touching on a couple numbers here, going back to your S&P 500 index comment. So in 2008, 2008, the calendar year, these are all drawdowns. So during the calendar year of 2008, the S&P 500 entry year drew down 49% in 2009, it drew down 28% in 2010, it drew down 16 in 2011. It drew down 19 in 2015, it drew down 12 in 2018, 20. And then in COVID year, last year, it drew down 34. Now granted, a lot of those years that finished in the positive, but if you have your hound down payments sitting there, your real estate down payments sitting there, you can get spooked and pull out at the wrong time. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken some of the benefits of equity and married them in with other asset classes that tend to perform in a more smooth fashion, a more predictable fashion.
So when we look at the portfolio, you’re looking at around 65 to 70% bonds, and those bonds are everything from us, treasuries guaranteed by the us government to inflation protected treasuries, referred to as tips. We may even own municipal bonds at certain points. Muni bonds are very expensive right now, relative to the alternatives out there. So we don’t own any we’ll own junk bonds or high yield depending on where we see value. And then we’ll even go as far as the own non us fixed income, think of things like emerging market debt, emerging market debt can get you yields of north of 5% right now, which is obviously dramatically more than you could get in the us. And one of the other things you don’t get out of something like an emerging market debt is as very low correlation to other asset classes that are in the portfolio.
So that’s the fixed income extremely, extremely, extremely important. And you won’t find this in many other places is commodities are in our portfolio. You’re not going to find commodities in many mutual funds out there, right? You could buy a pure play commodity fund, but you’re going to be hard pressed to find a mutual fund or an ETF that holds stocks, bonds, and commodities, and the same thing, right in the same vehicle, one ticket. So in the benefit of commodities are, think of things like gold yesterday. The stock market got whacked pretty good. The bond market got whacked as well. Gold did very well. Gold was up over 1% in commodities in general have done very well in the last several months because of inflation. So we, we couple in the commodities with the fixed income, and that makes up about 70% of the portfolio total.
And then the other 30ish percent is a diversified basket of stocks. And again, to, to, to what Taylor said about half of those are directly associated with the real estate industry. And we talk a lot about homes or houses, but there’s no difference between the companies that we’re purchasing in the portfolio from a commercial real estate perspective in a city to you know, to a house out in the countryside that that’s a residential investment, obviously. So I’ll just give you a couple examples here. So Home Depot and Lowe’s are obvious ones, but then we have a company named Carrier Global. They do air conditioning and air purification. So if you’re talking about a commercial building downtown, anywhere, it’s going to have a pretty heavy air conditioning and HVAC system in it. We’ve got that exposure in there. Think of things like Trek decks.
Those are all the decks that go on most residential and commercial properties at this point, Stanley Black and Decker that makes equipment things along those lines. So as well as just outright home builders, which is almost a pure hedge, right, almost a perfect hedge on home price inflation. So when you think about those type of stocks, I think it’s pretty comforting to see why they would hedge price inflation within the real estate market. And then the other piece of stocks that we have in there that make up that 30% are a global diversified basket of essentially large cap dividend payers and why we want those is because they generate pretty smooth return relative to some of the more aggressive stocks out there that you probably hear a lot about in the news. Things like Tesla and things like that. They’re high flyers. That’s not what we’re necessarily going for again, we’re going for like that 5.4ish long-term inflation kind of return target.
So we marry all that together, right? You got the fixed income, you’ve got the commodities and you’ve got the stocks that are in there and you end up with a portfolio that creates a very smooth return profile. So we’ve looked at back at this, back-tested the data through many different sources, and you’re going to find about a return of a little over five and a half percent over the last 15 years, the max draw down during that period. So the max off, if you were to borrow the worst possible debt, or if you were the, by the day before the market crashed was a 9% drawn out, right? So you put your a hundred dollars in, it dropped down to $91. And actually during that year, it finished at 109, right? So your, you made money that year, even though you did have a little bit of a draw down and that draw down happening during COVID, but I’m generally speaking, you’ve got a very smooth ride and it also pays a monthly dividend, which is, I think anybody who’s a passive income investor really appreciates dividends or, you know, rental property income things along those lines.
So you’re looking at about a 2% dividend that’s kicked out on a, on a monthly basis. So I would say at a high level, that’s what the portfolio is. We charge 44 basis points a year, and this is actively managed. So could you go out and buy the S&P 500 at a cheaper expense ratio? Absolutely. But there’s no finesse whatsoever in the S&P 500, right? You could have a draw down any year, enter year. That’s very meaningful. This portfolio that we built is very sophisticated. A lot of resources go into it and it’s actively managed, and there’s a lot more finesse in it than the S&P 500. So that’s why you’re going to have a slightly higher expense ratio at 44 basis points. Even that though is still very competitive, relative to other solutions out there. And then the last thing I would say is this is a complete portfolio for those people looking for a down payment, you don’t need to add things to this, right? This is designed to be a one-stop shop. You could put a hundred percent of your down payment in there. If you think you have a reasonable time period to until your next purchase and it’s free to buy or sell anywhere, right. If you’re using Robinhood Schwab Fidelity, it’s free to buy or sell no ticket charges, no lockup $10 nav. So those are really kind of the high level points on the investment side.
Okay. That’s a great summary. I think one of the takeaways that people should get from what you just said is that it is highly liquid, like any other security or equities that’s public traded. So you can be in and out, like in a day, if you need it, you wouldn’t do that. But I mean, that’s how liquid it is. Tell me about the 2% distribution. How does that work? Is that just put back into a person’s account? Or how does that work?
Yeah, so good question. When you’re using, you know, whatever platform you’re gonna use, whether it’s Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, you know, say you did this through your Morgan Stanley financial advisor, UBS financial advisor. You can either take that income, but you’re probably not going to do that because you’re trying to grow your down payment. So you’re going to click, when you go to put the purchase in, on the ETF, when you go to buy H O M H O M the ticker, you’re going to say reinvest dividends. So you’re just gonna, you know, you’re just going to click that little box when you go to place the trade. And then when that dividends kicked out on a monthly basis, it essentially dollar cost average is back into the ETF or gets reinvested back, and that’ll help you create returns. And if you’re like me, where you thought you were going to build your home, you know, at some point there in 2020, and now it’s 2021, and you’re thinking you’re probably going to have your home at 2023. You’re really happy to reinvest that dividend and compound your returns.
Yeah. The key there is the compounding that you get from the returns. You just put it back on the stack, and now you get returns on top of your returns. Absolutely. So a comment about the draw downs that you mentioned, like you cited draw downs every year with the S and P or the stock market in general, that would be a problem. Well, I’ll back up. First of all, that’s generally not a problem for somebody who’s a long-term investor. They’re long the market. They have no intentions of trading in and out. So the drawdowns are just an opportunity to buy back or dollar cost average in more and increase your position. And now you’re just buying the dips and, you know, you grow your equities portfolio. So that’s generally speaking, not an issue for people unless you’re panic selling, but I guess it would be a problem for a real estate investor.
Who’s got a shorter time horizon that might need their funds in six months or a year or a year and a half. And the timing of when they need the down payment to put towards their purchase or the escrow, or the closing falls at a time when there was a big draw down. Now, all of a sudden they’ve lost, you know, 10, 20% or more of their investment, their portfolio in the equities market. So, you know, if you have a crystal ball and you can predict the future, that’s great. You know, when again, in and out, if you’re lucky, then it’s not a problem, but if you’re unlucky or unfortunate and you’re at a time when you need the capital, you have to pull it out and you’re at a dip or a draw down or a market correction. Well, you can lose a fair amount, a significant amount of your portfolio quickly. And so what you guys are showing or talking about, the solution that you’re trying to provide is an ability to have a less volatile, more consistent, and hopefully a more predictable rate of return year over year, especially on the shorter term when people are saving for their down payment. So that way they can park it know that they have a reasonable expectation of a return without the downside risk of these major market drops when they happen. Is that a pretty good summary?
Yeah, Marco, one thing I would say is I should have prefaced this when we’ve talked about running a back test on the portfolio and having a draw down 9%, that was during a global pandemic, right? That was 2020 global pandemic. When you had stocks dropped 34% S&P 500, you had a lot of the bond market fall at the same time. So that’s one that’s atypical. Typically when, when stocks go down, bonds go up. But because it was a global pandemic and the markets literally locked up, they froze, it was unique scenario. You have a global pandemic, all bets are off a home may or may not save you, but in your normal year, right? You’re going to have a one, one and a half percent draw down over different points in time. Even during September of this year, HOM ETF had about a one and a half percent draw down S&P 500 was down over 5%.
And the bond market was down at the same time. So that, you know, you might have one and a half percent draw it on and to get any given point in time. But if we’re looking at around a five and a half percent return per annum, one and a half percent, isn’t a you know a huge deal. So that’s, that’s kind of the way that we think about it. And the last thing I would say is we, we will always have meaningful exposure to US treasuries, right? US treasuries have historically done extremely well during periods of economic contraction. And if we were to look at 2008, when was a huge economic contraction, right? Even the COVID crash that we had last March long dated us treasuries were up over 20%. They were up 32% in 2008, we have meaningful exposure there. We will always have meaningful exposure there. And we anticipate that positions like that will offset some of that potential volatility if there is an economic contraction. And then just generally speaking, we’ve got about 65% bonds bonds usually do well during any type of crash. Okay.
And to interject a little here, Marco, I think at the end of the day, what’s important to realize is that this is not supposed to be the shiniest tool, right? This is not supposed to be the Tesla stock or the Bitcoin crypto that can go up 25% in a month or something like that. This is meant to be that very smooth, consistent ride throughout couple interesting stats that you hear just as you speak about long-term investors and what they’re able to do versus shorter term intermediate investors that are looking for real estate purchases, even a long-term investors, don’t see as much success as they probably should.
Everyone knows you should buy low and sell high. Yet. The number one day of selling out of the stock market of all time was last March at the depth of the pandemic. Prior to that, the number one base of selling of all time was in March of 2009 at the depth of the great financial crisis. So realistically, what people need is something that smooths out that ride over time, but generally keeps them in the seat so they can experiencing experience that compounding return effect. So just to throw some numbers at you here from the opportunities that people have in the market. So if you were to put money aside in a savings account, and you were to put a thousand dollars every single month earmarked for that next real estate purchase over five years, that would give you just over $60,000 of capital and the current savings account rate.
So you would have garnered 0.05% return in that five. At that five-year a hundred thousand five-year $1,000 investment over time would allow you to afford a $400,000 home at a 15% down purchase. Now, if you’re able to keep pace with home price inflation and put that thousand dollars a month aside over five years, and you churn out 5.4% return, which is the target for this product, with that 15% down payment, you’re now able to afford a $458,000 home or $58,000 Delta over just putting it set aside in a savings account. So that’s what you want to do is you want to have your money working smarter for you, so you don’t have to work harder to put more money in a savings account.
That’s very interesting. The 5.4%, how did you come up with that number? Is it based on the backtesting and it’s based on historic data, or is that a target based on the portfolio mix that you have and what you expect to achieve going forward? Or is it a combination of the two?
It’s exactly the latter there, it’s a combination of the two. So again, over the last 50 years, home prices have inflated at 5.4% per year, but the asset allocation blend that we’ve put together on a back-tested basis captures just over that about 5.6% return per year. So that’s not a mistake that was set up that way intentionally to have you keep pace with long-term home price inflation. And again, if home prices go up next year at 16%, like they did over the last year, candidly, this portfolio is probably not going to keep pace, but in order to create something that would attempt to keep pace there, you’d have to take on an incredible amount of risk. And obviously the downside there becomes meaningfully higher.
Marco, I’ll just throw this out there too. So this is something that in our prior, in our prior life, when Taylor and I worked out well, you know, if you will, on wall street, the biggest piles of money in the United States are sitting in dominants. You know, for example, Harvard, right, their money there, they don’t need to spend that anytime that money they’ve got billions and billions of billions that are sitting there, that’s invested and they have no, no target that they’re looking to spend all of it at any given point in time. Even in that situation, they don’t invest in a hundred percent equity, right? They own us treasuries. They own investment grade, corporate bonds. They own defensive assets in their goal, things like that commodities, agriculture properties, things along those lines, they can take all the risks they want and they could be a hundred percent real. They could be real estate, private equity in S&P 500 index. If they want it to, they don’t do that. And they have no timeframe when they need to spend their money. They’ve got it there for the next hundred years.
So it just makes sense to a, because of the stats that Taylor pointed out, that the average investor doesn’t necessarily always buy and sell at the right time. It just makes sense to water down the volatility a little bit, to give yourself a more predictable experience and the HOM ETF, ticker HOM a is, is designed to do exactly that it’s designed to give you a more predictable outcome. And if we can give a more predictable outcome, it’s more likely that you’re gonna be able to get to that real estate investment in a in a more precise fashion. And the money will be there when you want it so that you can get that purchase and continue to build your empire.
Right. Okay. So clearly you don’t need to be an accredited investor to invest in HOM or stave because it’s publicly traded. You just need a brokerage account and you just park your money there for however long you need to, until you need it for your down payment. Is it fair to ask you the question, who is this not for? I mean, it sounds like a good solution for most people who are just piling up cash with the goal of having a down payment. And that’s great. I mean, there are not a lot of options out there. You put it in equities, you could put it into short-term promissory notes, you put it under your mattress, but who is this not for? Or is that even, you know, a good question?
No, that’s a perfectly fair question. I think the only circumstance that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to use this is if you’re legitimately have your eyes on a target purchase, that’s going to come up in the next few months. And at that point, it doesn’t make a ton of sense because you’re not going to be able to compound that 5.4% over time. So if you were looking at a purchase that’s going to happen in a month or two, I don’t know that it necessarily makes sense to do anything, but keep your money directly in cash.
For someone who hasn’t invested in equities or invested in equities much, you know, through a brokerage account, maybe they don’t even have a brokerage account. The obviously see the problem you’re solving and they, they understand the solution, but they’re still somewhat reluctant for whatever reason. Maybe this is just still unfamiliar territory and they don’t want to go down a road of something they haven’t done before. And don’t want to go through a learning curve of having to do this. What would you tell those people?
I think at the end of the day, they’re the thing they need to realize is that sitting in cash is garnering a negative purchasing power for them. So again, if home prices go up at 16% over last year, you sitting in a savings account, healing 0.05%, you’re losing 16% purchasing power over time. If it goes back to 5.4%, you’re losing 5.4% over time at the current rate that you’re getting at the bank. So essentially what you’re doing here is trading one risk. That’s a known risk homes are inflating in price, and you are only getting 0% return, 0.05 in a savings account versus a risk that is a controlled, managed volatility risk that is going to get you invested in the stock and bond market together in an actively managed portfolio to help you garner that again, home price inflation, target of 5.4% per year. So it’s trading one risk for another intelligent, and that’s a known risk that definitively is going to play out for a risk in the investment market. That is well put together designed specifically for you to have that home down payment money set aside to get you to that goal at the end of the day.
Yeah, I think it’s worth pointing out that what you keep calling risk is actually in my mind, a loss. So someone listening to this that is saving money. When I hear the word risk, it sounds like it’s a potential loss or a potential negative outcome or event. But the reality is, is inflation is here. It’s real. It’s now it has been, it will continue to be. So that risk that you’re talking about is real loss. So if you’re saving money, you’re losing purchasing power every day, every month, every year, just holding onto that. So your minimum goal, not your ultimate goal, but your minimum goal. In my mind, if you’re listening to this is the following, you need to preserve that purchasing power any way you can. You want returns that are going to at least match the real rate of inflation, not what you know, you might’ve been hearing in the media up until now, which would be nominal rate of inflation. You know, it’s what the talking heads talk about on TV and the news and the media. But you need to have a minimum of the real rate of inflation just to preserve the purchasing power of your dollar. Ideally, you want to beat that. So now your savings and your investment is actually giving you a positive rate of return. So now you’re ahead of the game. You have more purchasing power because you have more real dollars that are spendable that have beat the rate of inflation of whatever time period you’ve been investing or saving for.
Yeah. And then Marco, I’ll just throw something on that. So to your point, there may be a few viewers out there that you have that say, you know, guys, everybody’s talking about inflation right now, typically what everybody starts talking about something potentially, you know, it changes, right, because it’s peaking at that point. Well, if inflation were to go down, what would happen to the whole metea what would the performance look like if we looked at inflation over the last four decades, it’s generally speaking, been trending down, right? And even the back test that we ran on, this was in a low inflation environment, right? Until just recently until a year ago, we were in a low inflation environment. And the performance track record that we referenced, or the, the back test that we referenced is, is what played out during that low inflation environment, right?
When inflation was 2%, when inflation was 2%, this portfolio returned more like five and a half or 6%. So you had a real return, you know, of the difference there. So I would say that one, if there’s people out there that say, well, inflation is going to come down, does this still work for me? Absolutely. It still works for me, right? Bonds do very well in a low, low inflation environment. Secondly, if you’re somebody that’s new to this, you don’t need to put a hundred percent of your money, your down payment in right, put 10% of your down payment in put a thousand dollars in, put a hundred dollars in it, it get your toe in the water, take a step back, watch it for a month, watch it for two months. That’s how you get comfortable with things. And then you can become more of an investor over time.
Taylor and I, frankly, this was such a natural invention for us. This patent, you know, we have a patent pending process here on the investment component of this because we’ve been doing exactly this with our money. Since the second, we started to make money outside of college, which for me was all the way back in 2007, we did this, we just didn’t do it in a, in one vehicle. Right. We did it in a few different vehicles, but now that you can do it with one vehicle, it’s much more tax efficient. So yeah, that’s what I would say is that do the dollar cost average thing, if you’re not comfortable putting a big chunk in, put a little in, watch it, put a little more in.
I think it would be a topic for another day. And I’ll probably do an episode purely on the topic of inflation. But when I hear this, you know, the 2% CPI, the 2% rate of inflation, it makes me think that, you know, that is what you’re being told by, you know, the government departments that track the stuff. But, you know, we all know that every year they constantly change how they calculate the CPI, you know, the core index and everything else. So I don’t think that’s the true real rate of inflation. I mean, if you actually track it, like it was tracked back in the 1980s, which you know, is the original way to track consumer price index. It will show you that inflation has actually been higher. Now granted electronics seem to be always deflationary. But when you look at college, groceries, student loans, those are very inflationary items. And so you got to look at what people spend and what the real rate of inflation is. But again, like I said, you know, that’s probably a topic for another day. My point is that inflation is probably higher. I would argue it’s higher than what you’re talking about. So that’s even more of a need to defend yourself and protect yourself from the effects of inflation.
We completely agree if you’ve got somebody out there that doesn’t think there’s inflation. It’s not like this portfolio is going to fall out of bed. If there’s, you know, if there’s not inflation and as to what you alluded, we agree with you. Inflation is strong and it’s something that’s probably going to be pretty sticky here.
And this is also with this product specifically targeting home price inflation. So we’re not going after this broad basket of inflation that may or may not be present. We all agree with you that it is Marco, but it is very tangible to everybody that home price inflation is there and it is meaningful. And that’s the specific target of this product to help offset that home price inflation, to have your viewers able to purchase that whole real estate investment more quickly,
Guys, is there something that I didn’t ask you that you wish I would’ve asked you or I should’ve asked you?
No. Marco, I think you did a phenomenal job of fleshing out the story. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. Your wisdom and your advice through all your podcasts does not fall on deaf ears on this end. We enjoy all your education and we’ve taken it and put to use on our end as well.
I appreciate that guys. So listen, share with us where they can find you your website and the ticker again. So that way people can do their own research and follow up with you.
Yeah, absolutely. So a lifegoalinvestments.com is our website. You can follow us on Instagram or any of the social media platforms, just Life Goal Investments. It’s a pretty easy way to follow us, whether it’s, you know Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever it may be, you can definitely follow us there. And then again, the ticker is HOM right? And it works for both residential as well as commercial, which I know you have a mixed mixed dealer base and it’s called the LifeGoal Home Down Payment Investment ETF, Ticker: HOM.
Great, awesome guys. Well, Brett,Taylor, thank you for all the information and coming on the show, sharing about everything about your product. I think it’s fantastic. I can’t believe that nobody has overlooked this niche need and not filled it, but you guys did. And I think that’s fantastic. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of interest out of this episode. So thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having us. Thank you, Marco.
You’re welcome. And for everybody else, appreciate your time. We love having you as a subscriber. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do so. It’s just one mouse click or a finger click on your phone, help us spread the word, share the show with like-minded people. We want to get this information out to as many people as possible, especially in these inflationary times. We need hard assets, we need income producing assets and investment. Real estate is one of the best, if not the best investment that you could possibly make. So thanks for being on here and we will see you all on our next episode.
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